Marla Brown Fogelman
By Marla Brown Fogelman
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Life Learning to Love Christmas, Eggnog and All
Photograph via Flickr/Creative Commons As an Orthodox Jew who believes in the world to come while participating pretty fully in the world at large, I will admit that there are certain things I like about Christmas aka “the holiday season.” I like the festive spirit, the Starbucks sweet and spicy Christmas blend coffee, and the…
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News Let’s Do Coffee, Cousin Carrie
Although writer and actress Carrie Fisher and I have never met, we are related in that four-degrees-of-separation way that many Jews and half-Jews are — that is, my maternal great-aunt was married to her paternal great-uncle. I doubt that Ms. Fisher ever knew Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Jack, who are long deceased, and I only…
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News Sundays With ‘Jack,’ Bernie, Harvey and More
As we sit in a music classroom in an independent-assisted living facility in Silver Spring, Md., Jerome “Jack” Bluestein and I talk about Hitler. Or, more specifically, about the “Adolf Hitler” photo album that Bluestein has kept with him for the past 60-plus years. The book was known as a cigarette photo album because it…
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Life My Grandmother’s Obsession Becomes My Own
It was because of my late grandmother and her 40-year obsession with a book called “The Prophet of San Nicandro” that I was sitting at Columbia University’s Café 212, in the middle of a bone-chilling December afternoon, having coffee with professor John Davis. Davis, who holds the chair in Modern Italian History at the University…
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Books The Curious Case of the San Nicandro Converts
In a new book, “The Jews of San Nicandro,” author John Davis, the chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, sheds light on the little-known but highly curious tale of how a community of Italian Catholic peasants came to embrace Judaism during the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Using…
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Culture Italian Hilltop Conversion
The Jews of San Nicandro John Davis Yale University Press, 256 pages, $30 In a remote southern Italian town in the 1930s, a group of Catholics who had never before met any Jews began practicing their own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism. Helmed by a disabled and charismatic WWI veteran named Donato Manduzio, who fancied himself…
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News A Wedding Gift for Mom
It?s five months before my 48-year-old, tree-hugging, hippie sister?s wedding, and my mother and I are in my girlhood bedroom in Wilmington, Del., talking about tradition, family and, most important, bridal wear. ?People ask me what Beth is going to be wearing, but I don?t know,? Mom says, as she smoothes plastic over her mother-of-the-bride…
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